Free Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly

pressed close upon the road, catching the faces of the travelers with warty, overhanging boughs and dirty moss and their horses’ hooves with scabrous roots and soggy drifts of dead leaves. The black lattices of bare branches above them admitted only a fraction of the pallid daylight, but rain still leaked through, pattering in an endless, dreary murmur in the dead fern and hazel thickets. The ground was worse here, sodden and unsteady, or flooded in meres of silver water in which the trees stood, knee-deep and rotting; and Aversin remarked that the marshes of the south were spreading again. In many places the road was covered, or blocked with fallen trees, and the labor of clearing it or beating a path through the thickets around these obstacles left them all cold and exhausted. Even for Jenny, used to the hardships of the Winterlands, this was tiring, and the more so because there was no respite; she lay down weary at night and rose weary in the bleak grayness before dawn to travel on once again. What it was to Gareth she could well imagine. As he grew more weary, his temper shortened, and he complained bitterly at every halt.
    “What’s he looking for now?” he demanded one afternoon, when John ordered their fifth halt in three hours and, armed with his heavy horn hunting-bow, dismounted and vanished into the choking tangle of hazel and blackthorn beside the road.
    It had been raining most of the forenoon, and the tall boy drooped miserably on the back of The Stupid Roan, one of the spare horses they’d brought from the Hold. The other spare, Jenny’s mount, John had christened The Stupider Roan, a name that was unfortunately apt. Jenny suspected that, in his wearier moments, Gareth even blamed her for the generally poor quality of the Hold’s horseflesh. The rain had ceased now, but cold wind still probed through the very weave of their garments; every now and then a gust shook the branches above them and splattered them with leftover rain and an occasional sodden oak leaf that drifted down like a dead bat.
    “He’s looking for danger.” Jenny herself was listening, her nerves queerly on edge, searching the silence that hung like an indrawn breath among the dark, close-crowded trees.
    “He didn’t find any last time, did he?” Gareth tucked his gloved hands under his cloak for warmth and shivered. Then he looked ostentatiously upward, scanning what sky was visible, calculating the time of day, and from there going on to remember how many days they had been on the road. Under his sarcasm she could hear fear. “Or the time before that, either.”
    “And lucky for us that he didn’t,” she replied. “I think you have little understanding of the dangers in the Winterlands...”
    Gareth gasped, and his gaze fixed. Turning her head quickly, Jenny followed his eyes to the dark shape of Aversin, his plaids making him nearly invisible in the gloom among the trees. With a single slow movement he had raised his bow, the arrow nocked but not yet pulled.
    She tracked the trajectory of the arrow’s flight to the source of the danger.
    Just visible through the trees, a skinny little old man was stooping arthritically to scrape the dry insides from a rotting log for kindling. His wife, an equally lean, equally rag-clad old woman whose thin white hair hung lankly about her narrow shoulders, was holding a reed basket to receive the crumbling chips. Gareth let out a cry of horror. “NO!”
    Aversin moved his head. The old woman, alerted also, looked up and gave a thin wail, dropping her basket to shield her face futilely with her arms. The dry, woody punk spilled onto the marshy ground about her feet. The old man caught her by the arm and the two of them began to flee dodderingly into the deeper forest, sobbing and covering their heads with their arms, as if they supposed that the broad-tipped iron war arrow would be stopped by such slack old flesh.
    Aversin lowered his bow and let his targets stumble unshot into the wet